The National Health Action party, and why you should join

NHA Party founder Clive Peedell explains what has happened to the National Health Service in England and why his new party is needed to defend it.

Dr Clive Peedell and Dr Richard Taylor

Having witnessed what is surely one of the greatest betrayals in British parliamentary history, we have formed the
National Health Action party to raise awareness about what is happening to the
NHS and the glaring deficits in our democratic parliamentary process. It will
offer practical policy solutions for the NHS and stand up to the political
obfuscation and sleaze that is endemic in today’s political class. NHS
supporters and the general public now have a genuine opportunity to get behind
a political party that is fully behind defending the NHS, and serious about
holding the political class to account. This is why we set it up and why we
think it’s needed:

Prior to the 2010 General Election, the NHS wasn’t one of
the key election battlegrounds because despite the financial crisis, all 3 main
political parties had signed up to maintaining NHS spending levels. Moreover, David
Cameron had repeatedly promised that there would be “no more top-down reorganisations” of the NHS. Following the
election and formation of the Coalition Government, this promise was reinforced
by the Coalition Agreement, which specifically
pledged to “stop the top-down
reorganisations of the NHS that have got in the way of patient care”.

Yet within 2 months, Andrew Lansley had published his White
Paper Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS,
which was widely
acknowledged across the NHS stakeholder community as the most radical plan for
NHS change since its inception. The NHS Chief Executive, David Nicholson famously
described the changes as so big, they could be “seen from
space”.
This clearly called into question the democratic legitimacy of these reforms.

Moreover, the
Government had systematically failed to make the case for such radical change
to the NHS. This was well summarized by Professor Kieran Walshe of the Manchester Business School,
writing
in the BMJ:

“Patient and public satisfaction with the NHS
were at an all time high and the case for change was never properly articulated”.

In fact the
Commonwealth Fund Report had recently shown the NHS to be one of the most cost
effective and highly performing healthcare systems in the world.

Of greatest concern, however, was
what the Health and Social Care Act actually meant for the NHS. Health policy academics
and lawyers with expertise in public, constitutional and commercial law, published
evidence in the Lancet
and BMJ,
explaining how the Bill would lead to the abolition of the NHS in England. They
detailed how the legislation would fundamentally undermine the founding principles
of the NHS by setting the legal stage for private companies to be entitled to
run much of the NHS, and for competitive market forces to determine the way
many health services would be provided. The public did not vote for this.

Not surprisingly, there was
unprecedented opposition to the reforms from across the full spectrum of NHS
stakeholders including patient groups, the BMA, RCN, Royal College of Midwives,
and the medical Royal Colleges. Remarkably, the BMJ, Health Service Journal and
the Nursing Times published an unprecedented joint editorial condemning the
reforms as an “unholy mess”, which
had “destabilised and damaged one
of this country’s greatest achievements: a system that embodies social justice
and has delivered widespread patient satisfaction, public support, and value
for money”.

Yet despite the lack of
democratic legitimacy and widespread professional concern and opposition, the
Health and Social Care Bill was still railroaded into legislation by coalition
MPs and peers. This was particularly problematic for the Liberal Democrat
leadership who needed to use all their political skills to overcome the
democratic will of their grassroots members and even their own health policy advisors. This was epitomized
at their 2012 Spring conference with the skullduggery of the infamous “Shirley Williams motion”, which was used to
block another motion calling for the bill to be killed off.The Liberal Democrats had put the survival of
the Coalition ahead of the survival of the NHS. In fact, the coalition nature
of Government had ensured that the crucial pro-market and pro-privatisation
clauses and sections of the Bill went through relatively unscathed because the
Government had a majority in both Houses.

To many, including the founding
members of the National Health Action party, the parliamentary passage of the
Health and Social Care Bill was an embarrassment to our democracy. Yet, this
was not the only impetus for
the formation of a political party to defend the NHS. It was more the straw
that broke the camel’s back. The key political issue has been the fact
that over last 2 decades all 3 major political parties have supported the role
of the market in healthcare and other public services, with an increasing role
for private sector provision of services. These policies are firmly based in
neoliberal ideology, which has dominated political and economic thinking since
the oil shocks of the late 1970s (which led to a collapse in confidence in
Keynesian demand management economics), and the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989.
Neoliberalism is based on the idea that maximum market freedom with minimal
state interference is the best and most efficient way to organise society. It
was epitomised by Reaganomics and Thatcherism and then embraced by Tony Blair
as New Labour’s “Third Way”.
This was well summed by Labour MP Jon Cruddas in the New Statesman in 2007:

“After years in opposition
and with the political and economic dominance of neoliberalism, new Labour
essentially raised the white flag and inverted the principle of social
democracy. Society was no longer to be master of the market, but its servant.
Labour was to offer a more humane version of Thatcherism, in that the state
would be actively used to help people survive as individuals in the global
economy - but economic interests would always call all the shots.”

“All public services have to be based on a diversity of independent
providers who compete for business in a market governed by consumer choice. All
across Whitehall,
any policy option now has to be dressed up as “choice”, “diversity”, and
“contestability”. These are the hallmarks of the “new model public service”

This is why New labour ramped up Thatcher’s NHS internal market with their
own market system based on the idea of patient choice to drive competition between a plurality of any willing
providers (AWPs), driven by the Payment by Results (PbR) system – “money
following the patients”. So New Labour’s NHS reforms have built the perfect foundations
for Mr Lansley’s more radical pro-market reforms. The Health and Social Care Act
is a clearly a catalyst for yet more NHS commercialisation and privatisation,
which is in keeping with the Coalition Government’s broader neoliberal supply
side economic policies to replace large swathes of the public sector with the
private sector. This is also in keeping with the political thinking of
the Orange Book Liberal Democrat leadership who have proposed that the NHS
should become a European style social insurance system.

In summary, none of the main
political parties can be trusted with the stewardship of the NHS, because they
all believe in using the flawed market model to deliver healthcare. This is
despite the overwhelming evidence that market failure is an inherent problem in
healthcare, and incompatible with the founding principles of the NHS. Hence, those
who value the idea of a publicly funded, provided and accountable NHS have been
left with nowhere to go politically. Although, the Labour party have said they
will repeal the Act, we would still be left with their own marketised system.
We therefore need a new political party that can be trusted by the public to
defend our most cherished institution: the National
Health Action Party.

*The NHAP intends to stand about
50 candidates at the next General Election, as well as candidates for local and
European elections. Seats will be selected strategically and although
candidates will have independent Manifestos, they will all support NHA health
policy and act in the wider public interest.

The party aims to start
campaigning in the next few months and will have its inaugural Annual General
Meeting later this year. The party welcomes all members of the public to join
as members, not just healthcare professionals..

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